Rattlers miss playoffs on quirky rules

John Galloway makes a save during last season. The veteran goalie and the Rattlers will be back playing in downtown Rochester this summer after playing home games at Aquinas and in Brockport.(Photo: Jamie Germano/@jgermano1/Staff Photographer)Buy Photo

When the dust of the final night of the Major League Lacrosse regular season settled, it did nothing more than cloud the playoff picture.

An unprecedented seven of nine teams, including the Rochester Rattlers, finished with 8-6 records, leaving the four postseason berths to be sorted out by league rules.

“I think it’s good for the league (having seven teams tied),” said Kyle Denhoff of the Rattlers. “It shows how much talent there is across the league. But I was interested in how the league was going to calculate ... who was going to move on.”

Tie-breaking procedure steps, according to the league, are as follows:

A. Best win-loss percentage in all games among tied teams;

B.Best total scoring margin in all games among tied teams;

C. Best total scoring margin in all games;

D. Strength of victory in all games;

E. Coin toss;

Rochester fans seemingly could rejoice in this because, according to procedure “A”, the Rattlers had a .500 record head-to-head with the tied teams, good for the fourth and final playoff spot.

Rules, apparently, are meant to be broken — or at least bent. Here’s how things shook down.

Among the tied teams, Rochester held a 6-6 record — they also played the most games against the other teams in the pool which apparently was not a factor in the considering the first tiebreaker.

Rochester finished tied for the most wins in the original group, but because they played more games — again, among tied teams — they didn’t have the higher percentage.

The two teams with the best records in head-to-head match-up among tied teams, the Denver Outlaws and the Ohio Machine at 6-4, were selected as the candidates for the No. 1 seed. That seed was decided by procedure “B”, Ohio had the better scoring margin against Denver and was selected as the No. 1 seed.

Logic would dictate this would make Denver the No. 2 seed. Not how it works in the MLL.

Once Ohio was selected as the No. 1 seed, all the remaining tied team’s wins — or losses — against the Machine were thrown out and the procedure went through again with the six remaining tied teams.

Not good for Rochester.

Two of their original six wins came against the Machine; the Rattlers' record among the tied teams now dropped to 4-6.

Back to procedure “A”: The New York Lizards, who originally finished with the third-best head-to-head record according to procedure “A” — 6-5 — now had the best record of 6-3 because two of their losses were thrown out after Ohio was selected as the No. 1 seed.

So, the Lizards earned the No. 2 seed, and the scenarios reset again, this time making any games the remaining teams had played against the Lizards also irrelevant.

Again, not good for Rochester.

The Rochester Rattlers flattened Ohio twice during the regular season but the Machine earned the top seed in the playoffs.(Photo: Sarah Michaels/Pretty Instant)

In the regular season, the Rattlers lost two games to the Lizards, so now their overall record among remaining tied teams was 2-5.

Procedure “A” … again: The third seed went to Denver, a team that Rochester split its two regular-season games against.

The Rattler’s record against the remaining tied teams was now 1-4, and one last time with pesky procedure “A” left the Charlotte Hounds with the fourth and final playoff spot.

Exhausted? Exasperated? Think how the Rattlers felt.

“No, I don’t (believe the four best teams made it into the playoffs),” said Denhoff, a Penfield product. “I do respect all the other guys on the teams (that did make it). They put in as much effort and work as we do. But at the end of the day, there’s teams in the playoffs we beat twice and teams in the playoffs we beat with a higher goal differential. We should’ve had an opportunity to play in the playoffs.”

Despite the fact Rochester finished 2-0 against the No. 1 seed, had a 1-1 record and a plus-6 goal differential against the No. 3 seed and similarly a 1-1 record with a plus-1 goal differential against the No. 4 seed, it appears Denhoff's frustration is well-founded in believing the Rattlers were weaseled out of a shot at the playoffs.

4 teams in. @RattlersLax holds the tiebreaker over 3 of them. How happy is @MLLCommish that the boys in Rochester aren't playing next week?

Rattlers goalie John Galloway took to Twitter to call out league commissioner David Gross, asking him if he was happy that the “boys in Rochester” weren’t playing next week.

“For me, I think the goal of tiebreakers is to reward the most productive teams of the season,” said Denhoff, a St. John Fisher graduate.

The Rattlers weren’t the only ones who got a backhand by league procedures. Consider the Chesapeake Bayhawks, headlined by Rochester Knighthawk and former Irondequoit standout Joe Walters, who also held head-to-head tiebreakers against three of the four playoff teams but were left out of the playoffs.

Although Rochester, the back-to-back MLL Championship game runners-up, won’t have a chance to make it to its third consecutive title game, the league certainly added extra motivation for next season.

Speaking of chance, though, next time it might be fairer to go with procedure “E” — coin flip.